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How the Ivy League Broke America
The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.
He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning—in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Brasília, or construct a system of efficiency-maximizing roadways that would have cut through Greenwich Village. When Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, studied how elite firms in finance, consulting, and law select employees, she found that recruiters are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting—perhaps Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life.
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